Tactical Media in Crisis
Strategies for Tactical Media
The closing strategy debate of Next 5 Minutes 4, on the limits and prospects of tactical media. Many people feel that reactionary forces have hijacked the symbolic landscape of media. In the preparation for this debate media theorist McKenzie Wark asks why progressive and alternative media were so taken aback by the events and the way they were subsequently seized upon by the media tacticians ‘from the dark side’? Why were the tacticians on the bright side unable to seize the momentum of intense public debate over the last two years?
McKenzie Wark advocates a strategic engagement with the tactical and media. He writes: "it is our task is to invent a means of grasping and even accessing the event-space of media itself, rather than merely explaining it away." Leading to the key question: "Can Tactical media anticipate, rather than be merely reactive?"... We require "a better theory, but one that is simultaneously a better practice. A practice one might call: strategies for tactical media. Not a strategic media, but a strategic depth of concepts and competences for engaging with the event-space of media in the moments when it is in crisis."
An open microphone debate, fired off with 4 short introductory statements by:
- McKenzie Wark, Australian media theorist and writer, currently lives and works in New York.
- Arun Mehta, Delhi-based activist and educator.
- Joanne Richardson, writer, organiser and editor of subsol webzine, Cluj.
- Jodi Dean, editor of Feminism and the New Democracy (Sage, 1997). She has recently published a book on the ideology of the information age, Publicity's Secret.